


Thirsty work

by pushdragon



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 05:13:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17318693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: Eames spends a frustrating evening alone in their hotel room, taking apart the mark’s shareholdings over a can of lager. Then it’s Arthur’s turn.





	Thirsty work

**Author's Note:**

> Who knew this idea was in my head and waiting to be written? Not even me. If you feel like a story where the plot ends after the second sentence, this could be the one you’ve been looking for.

By the time Arthur came back, Eames had familiarised himself with the key investments in the mark’s stock portfolio, enough to bluff his way through a meeting on anything from gene patents to South East Asian hydro-electric ventures. He jotted down a couple of noteworthy figures from the last of the annual reports, to fix them in mind, while Arthur slid the key card back into its packet and dropped it on the counter by the kettle. There were a few moments of silence as he messed around with his wallet, replacing cards and notes that didn’t belong with the persona he’d worn for the evening. 

“How did you go with the investment history?” Arthur asked, when he was done. “Any surprises?”

Work then. Eames suppressed the first idle imaginings of where the late hour and moderately luxurious hotel room could have taken them, and followed his lead. He brushed the empty crisp packet into the rubbish bin and took a sip from his half-drunk can of lager.

“GSK can lose half a billion dollars settling a law suit and still turn a twelve percent profit,” he dutifully reported, shutting the screen of his laptop and leaning back in the chair. “You should scope out Big Pharma for commissions. All that unpatented research IP must be worth paying for.” 

“We’ve barely got this job off the ground.”

There was fatigue in Arthur’s face, contradicting the alert, straight lines of his suit and tie. It was easy to picture his evening of forced camaraderie and small-talk, mingling his way around a room full of strangers as he tried to guess which conversation the mark’s primary political backer might join next, the tension evident only in his stranglehold grip on his champagne flute. In the past, Eames would have totted up Arthur’s self-induced tension – the constant, grating disappointment of the perfectionist – as an inevitable inconvenience that sucked the fun out of a job. 

He found himself itching to know how much that had changed now; how much permission he had to interfere. 

“Did you get what you wanted?”

Arthur let out a terse breath, too tight to be a sigh. “Enough to work with. Barely. We’ll go over it tomorrow.” 

He took his notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and dropped it on the counter. No doubt the five minute cab ride would have been all he needed to jot down the salient information he’d gleaned over a three-hour soiree.

“I did offer,” Eames shrugged, which was rather under-selling the frustrated resistance he’d put up to letting Arthur take on this task that sat so squarely within not only Eames’s skill set but also his love of theatre and tale-spinning and a good old-fashioned hoodwink. 

“Yes, Eames. I remember.” 

He looked drained from the evening, closed off, as if every fabricated smile and pleasantry had sapped his integrity. When Eames came out of an undercover role, he felt larger than life and had a hard time keeping himself out of the line of fire until the false sense of invincibility wore off. Perhaps the duplicity grated on Arthur more than he usually let on. After all, he had brought an incongruous sense of honour into an industry that had no use for it – in fact, his and Cobb’s insistence on doing business using the same stiff courtesies from their academic background, meeting treachery with a distaste that bordered on arrogance, had made them unpopular and prone to betrayal. 

Or maybe it was only lingering jetlag and two nights of distracting each other from sleep. Arthur was still a mostly unknown quantity, and nothing piqued Eames’s interest like a well-kept secret.

Eames slouched back from the desk, arms hooked over the back of his chair, twisting towards him.

“You remember. And had you forgotten the part where you promised to make it up to me?”

The lines of his jacket shifted as Arthur subtly stiffened, weighing up whether this little falsehood was worth the trouble of an argument. 

Eames didn’t give him time. “Come over here.”

Hesitantly, Arthur came. His gaze flicked to the P&L print-out on the desk, as if considering a distraction, then back to Eames. 

Eames shifted round in the chair to face him. “Closer.” 

You wouldn’t know from the pristine state of the white shirt that Arthur had been wearing it through hours of hors d’oeuvres and top-ups of Moet. The tie was a recent purchase: a cross-hatch pattern in grey tones with the occasional square of trust-me dark blue, grains of raw silk that played the light. Everything about him was the sort of expensive that tingled in Eames’s thieving fingers. 

When he slid his hands onto Arthur’s waist, the solid warmth of his body was exciting, next to the cool, fine-weave cotton and the satiny lining of his suit jacket. This was all it had taken for him to lose it, the first time – and, come to think of it, most of the later times as well. 

He pulled Arthur a half-step closer, and leaned in, head tilted, to bite at the lower swell of his pectoral. He listened for the controlled exhale that did a poor job of covering Arthur’s immediate response. When he undid two buttons so he could slide his finger in and stroke his nipple into a lovely tight knot, he felt the responsive shudder, the shaky exhale of willingly surrendered self-control. He kept it up until Arthur’s lips were parted, his neck beginning to flush, then withdrew his finger, carefully refastened both buttons, and patted the tie into place. 

“Oh no,” he said when Arthur reached up to finish the task himself, and tugged his hand away. “You’ve already had your fun for the night. I’ve been stuck here translating auditors’ reports from German and Cantonese.”

“Was it really that bad?” Arthur said, insinuating himself between Eames’s knees as he thumbed lightly at the loose collar of the rugby jersey Eames had spent the evening in. “God knows how you’ve built yourself a career as a con man without having the patience for a bit of groundwork.”

Eames’s hands slipped around onto his arse and gave it a leisurely squeeze, working slowly towards the gap between his cheeks and rubbing against the tight fit of fabric over lean, tensing muscle while Arthur twisted at his shirt collar and tried not to squirm. 

“All those auditor’s statements might be your idea of a hot night in –” Arthur made a distracted noise of disagreement. “– but I’ve had a pretty grim time of it, and I’d say I’m due a reward.”

He drew one hand back to lay his palm over the front of Arthur’s trousers, and met gratifying heat the solidified under his touch. Arthur pushed back against him and grasped the back of Eames’s chair as if he might need the support. 

“So I’d very much appreciate it if you would bend yourself over this desk and show me how grateful you are for getting to do the fun part.”

“Really?” Arthur said, mouth tightening. His attention dipped down to Eames’s lips in an obvious counter-proposal.

Eames shifted to make space. “Go on.”

He did it, half-committed, leant over the desk, straight-armed with his hands tented as they held him up. 

Eames adjusted the angle of his chair to put himself side-on and cupped Arthur’s arse again, rubbing just enough to send body heat through the cloth. He slid his fingers down the seam, pressing up between Arthur’s legs until he felt Arthur shift against him and let out a soft, quick breath. 

“Don’t tell me this is as far as you can bend in these trousers. We need to get you a –”

Arthur went down on his elbows, still holding himself stiffly, and damned if that didn’t make Eames’s blood hot, the thought of how much unexplored territory still lay between them. The whole filthy, creative repertoire of twists they hadn’t tried on each other yet; all the boundaries he had left to test. It still made his heart kick up to wake in the dead of night and see Arthur’s naked body across the room, illuminated only by the greyish light of his phone as he replied to an email from another timezone. If he got the chance, learning how to take Arthur apart, stitch by carefully placed stitch, was going to keep him busy for a hell of a long time. 

Arthur’s face was curled down into the desk, almost hiding the quick, discomfited blink of his lashes. Eames wheeled his chair around and bent to kiss one cheek through the tight wool, then the other, and he replaced his kisses with the palms of his hands. He gave Arthur a bit more time to start to relax into the unaccustomed position before he reached around to unbutton him and draw his trouser and briefs down to mid-thigh, where the merciless tailoring was just tight enough to hold them up.

The long, lean muscles of Arthur’s buttocks seemed freshly tantalising as Eames folded the hem of the suit jacket under to get it out of his way. He was as neatly tended here as everywhere else, with a neat little bud of an arsehole that Eames had never had such a leisurely view of before. 

Possibilities flowed through his mind from his growing mental catalogue of things he wanted to do with Arthur – all those cheerfully transgressive visions his imagination cultivated in quiet moments, only to vanish into a muddle in the urgency of Arthur’s hands on him. He wasn’t sure what he wanted, apart from taking all the time in the world to strip Arthur out of his formalwear, piece by delicious piece. He reached for his beer can and took a swig to slow himself down, and trailed his finger down Arthur’s crease, just to witness the clench and tremble of his involuntary response. 

Arthur’s feet shifted fractionally further apart, and Eames’s whole system gave a jolt at that. In a daze of undirected lust, he held out the can, and tipped it. A drop, just a splash, above Arthur’s entrance. The stream rolled down, hugging all those intimate contours until it dispersed into nothing.

The reaction was electric. Arthur’s hips bucked, and his fist clenched against the desk as he drew a naked, gasping breath. Surprise, more than anything, Eames thought. The power of the unexpected. He waited for Arthur to still himself and then did it again.

“Jesus, Eames,” he managed to get out, tightly, once the shudders of reaction had released him. “I have to wear this suit tomorrow. Watch what you’re doing.” 

But he was still bent at ninety degrees over the desk. Eames leaned back, as calm and considered as he could manage.

“Well why haven’t you taken it off then?”

And if that wasn’t the loveliest sight of the evening so far, Arthur leaning on the desk, fighting distraction and uncertain balance, not meeting Eames’s eyes as he pulled his feet up to jerk his laces open and throw his shoes and socks clumsily towards the closet, then bent over provocatively to slide the trousers down to his ankles and step out of them. Eames draped them over the back of the chair and reached up to straighten Arthur’s tie, attention dipping hungrily from the crisp fold of his collar to the outline of his cock barely visible through his shirt. He gently caught Arthur’s wrist when he looked like he might be reaching for it, and pressed a quick kiss into his palm.

“That will do nicely, thank you.”

At least one of them could have got off by now, in the time he’d taken to get Arthur’s lower half undressed. But Arthur wasn’t objecting, as Eames trailed his fingers up Arthur’s flank, up to his top ribs, then back again, enjoying the pretty view of everything it temporarily revealed. Arthur was unmistakably flushed now, quick breaths pressing his throat into the constriction of his collar. He made a low sound of distress when Eames lifted the hem of his shirt to trail slow kisses across his stomach, ignoring the obvious lure of his plumped-up dick. 

“Think you could move this along a little?” Arthur asked, something decidedly expectant behind the irritation. 

Eames kissed him again, through the shirt this time, and smiled. 

“As you were, please.”

This time, Arthur eased himself down into a perfectly permissive right angle.

He’d learned this much about Arthur. Although he gave away his kisses sparingly, once or twice, when the right combination of teasing and delay aligned themselves, he’d turned greedy for touch, until he moaned into practically anything Eames cared to put in his hot little mouth. He hadn’t worked out the trick for getting them to that point, yet, but it was one of the things he fantasised about most.

Eames got down on his knees and closed his hands around the faint indentations left by Arthur’s socks, massaging his ankles long enough to give him plenty of time to think about where Eames might touch him next. He slid his hands up to stroke the soft skin behind his knees.

“Something you’d like to ask for?” he prompted. “Arthur?”

“God, you know what I need. Put your mouth on me.”

He reached for the beer can instead, using his free hand to fold the tail of Arthur’s shirt up onto the small of his back, leaving him bare. Slowly, mouth dry with anticipation, Eames tilted the can and let another trickle run down into the channel of Arthur’s arse, flowing into the dip of his entrance and out again in a thin stream that crossed over his perineum with a fine trail of white bubbles, hugging the contours of his balls until there was no further to go. It dripped messily, heavily into the hotel carpet. Eames held his breath and made himself wait an excruciating count of twelve before he did it again. 

Arthur’s hands were clenched together now, white- knuckled, no more words left in him. There was no mistaking how aroused he was, balls pulling tight and a fine tremor running through his hamstrings, with every shift in every tendon on display for Eames to watch. 

When he stroked the curve of Arthur’s buttock, the muscle clenched and Arthur rose up on his toes, whole body arching back towards Eames’s mouth. 

“Gently, Arthur,” he said in a voice that sounded more ragged than it ought to. “Gently.”

And then, in a strategy he wasn’t sure he could explain to himself, he placed the beer can right in the small of Arthur’s back, planted it securely among the folds of his suit jacket, and let it go. 

Arthur’s breathing changed immediately – fast and shallow, scarcely any movement in his ribs. He braced his folded arms wider apart on the desk and propped his chin on his hands. Eames was suddenly, painfully aware of the discomfort of his own arousal cramped in behind his zipper. Arthur wasn’t saying no. He wasn’t asking for Eames to cut him some slack. It made him fuzzy-headed with anticipation of all the other things Arthur might let him do, in weeks to come. He opened his trousers for a bit of relief and gave his full attention back to the task at hand. 

“You’ll have to keep perfectly still,” he said, hushed. “Think you can do that for me?”

The only answer he got was Arthur edging his bare feet a bit further apart, planting them firmly into the carpet. The beer can rose and fell with the movement, and kept its balance. 

Starting delicately, he reached out and teased the private furl of Arthur’s arsehole with the pad of his thumb. At the first touch, Arthur gave an outright groan, swiftly swallowed. The responsive flesh clenched and loosened, the tension practically quaking into the muscles of his buttocks and thighs as he tried desperately to keep his reaction under control, and the harder he tried to stay still, the more it all trembled out of him, in harsh panting breaths, in the occasional bitten-back groan. The can wobbled and righted itself, then wobbled again each time Eames stroked him.

Finally, Eames leaned in to see what he could do with his tongue. The tip of it teased faintly over the soft ridges of his arsehole, and Arthur went instantly still, barely breathing, until he did it again, tongue switching up and down but barely making contact. By some feat of acrobatics Arthur found a little more give in his body: the arch of his spine deepened and his thighs turned out to expose just a fraction more of himself to Eames’s mouth, and that was the sort of commitment that had to be rewarded. Eames pushed his tongue flat and hard against Arthur’s hole, lavishing him with slippery pressure, and only then did Arthur let out the first all-out unguarded groan. 

After that, Eames spent a while licking him slow and thorough, lapping up the residue of beer right along the crease of him, while Arthur’s thighs strained under his hands. It was a work of art, how his whole body tensed and quivered around that one point of contact, and didn’t dare move any further. 

When it wasn’t enough anymore, Eames wet his index finger in his mouth and rubbed the pad of it over Arthur’s hole. Arthur sighed as it slipped in, the clench of muscle terribly intimate without the slick of lube, the inside of him shockingly hot and soft. It felt so good he spent a minute, maybe many minutes, doing nothing more than fuck Arthur with his finger, testing the resistance and permission as he slid in and out, feeling him open up and let the intrusion in. When he lifted his free hand to Arthur’s dick, he found it nudging up against his belly. It took a few strokes to get him hard, and then wet, and then, at last, swearing in a fervent whisper as his hips started to move of their own accord, pushing back for more, and Eames had to pull his finger out to catch the beer can half a second from disaster. 

Arthur’s eyes were hooded and dazed when Eames pulled him up and sat him on the desk.

“Don’t think I’m finished with you,” he said, with an unwarranted drunken slur as he hooked an arm under one of Arthur’s knees to bend his leg up, and spat as thoroughly as he could onto his two fingers, and pushed at Arthur with dizzy persistence until he got them both in. 

That worked like a charm: Arthur’s free leg came up onto his shoulder, the length of him practically jack-knifed between Eames and the wall and Arthur, dark-eyed and breathless, didn’t seem to mind a jot. 

For a moment, Arthur seemed lost in the rhythm, in the shallow roll of his hips that met each stroke as it came into him, and curled and coaxed its way out again. He was making a lot of noise still, as if now that he’d started he had no idea how to shut it off. 

“Undo those buttons for me, won’t you?”

An instant later, Arthur was working his buttons one-handed, and pulling the knot of his tie undone to bare his breastbone completely, and then Eames was free to lavish his throat in passionate, grazing bites while his fingers kept up the same sure and tantalising rhythm. His own cock was aching, but he could hardly stop or even slow down when the desk was starting to thump against the wall with each stroke as Arthur braced his hands and twisted deliberately to meet it.

He’d witnessed Arthur beaten, and shot, and drugged into incoherence, and none of it was like this, the jolted, hungry groans, the greedy grip that cupped the nape of Eames’s neck then trailed over his ear, his jaw, seeking out his mouth --

And that’s what was missing. Eames bent in and kissed him, and Arthur was ready to open his mouth and moan into that too.

“Touch me,” Arthur started to murmur, in between bites to Eames’s jaw, his shoulder, anywhere he could reach. “I can’t take anymore. God, touch me, touch me.”

But that --- Eames ground to a panting halt. Because the trouble was, as much as he liked the way Arthur gave head when he was in control of himself – generous and calculatingly varied – his favourite memory was the one time he’d had Arthur’s mouth on him in a state like this, hard and tormented, when he had sucked like it could never be enough to satisfy him.

“I’d like to watch you swallow me down.”

Arthur gave a growl of objection accompanied by a look that, down in a dream, would have presaged a bullet to the forehead.

He leaned down to bite gently at Arthur’s bottom lip, let it slide through his teeth. Then Arthur’s tongue was sudden and hot in his mouth, as if he could have got himself off with a kiss if only he could drive it deep enough.

“Arthur,” he heard himself say, one hand on the straining muscles of Arthur’s bicep, the other holding his head still to kiss his jaw, his neck. “Arthur.”

“You’re the worst person I’ve ever slept with,” Arthur hissed at him, turning his face for a moment against Eames’s cheek. “Go on then. Fuck my mouth if you want to.” 

And then he was pushing free, slithering down onto his knees, shrugging the suit jacket onto the floor and shaking his hands free of the sleeves to wrench Eames’s trousers open in two deft moves and kiss him hot and shocking through his briefs. “That I can work with,” he breathed as he lifted the waist elastic free and drew it down. 

Eames couldn’t scrabble fast enough to get his jersey and t-shirt off and out of the way. With one hot look, Arthur sucked the head into his mouth, stroking it firmly with his tongue while there was still a bit of give in it. A few seconds of that lush treatment was all it took before Eames was so hard he was dizzy with it, utterly at Arthur’s mercy.

He was never going to last, but this was what he had wanted: Arthur’s committed, deep strokes. Eyes closed, crease of concentration on his brow. The stiff fold of his collar still hugging the back of his neck as he sucked, shirt barely clinging to one shoulder, the other mostly bare, and naked everywhere else. He fed his mouth down Eames’s cock as far as he could go, and every so often he’d give a hungry murmur of pleasure on the outstroke and pull off to lick his lips clean or plant a ridiculously pornographic kiss on the leaking tip.

The skin was slick with sweat under his fingers as he traced Arthur’s hairline, trying to hold himself back for a few moments longer. But then Arthur’s eyes flickered open, flicked up to him with a look so thoroughly satisfied that his control fell apart at the seams and he came, quick as a gunshot and almost as hard, while Arthur pressed him up against the desk and sucked without mercy until he’d swallowed his fill. 

Light-headed, Eames almost surrendered to the pull of gravity, but then Arthur was on his feet again, sliding back onto the desk and making a gap between his thighs just the perfect size for Eames to slip into as Arthur said nothing but “Yes, yes, yes”. 

He cinched his thumb and first finger around the base of Arthur’s cock, holding him down just to feel the clench of muscle as he struggled weakly to thrust into the grip, get some movement, some desperately needed friction. Arthur turned to kiss his forehead, his cheek, between tortured pants of breath. 

“Eames,” he breathed, and squeezed his eyes closed. “I need- “

“You’re lovely like this. So lovely.”

It was the only time he could talk to Arthur this way – the only other time he’d think to get away with it. When Arthur was too far out of his head to object. 

“Look at you, spread out under my hands like you’d never been touched before.”

The words must have reached him at some level, though, because his face drifted towards the sound of Eames’s voice as he groaned, “Come on, you’re killing me—“ and threw back his head to bare that exquisite arch of throat that Eames couldn’t help but open his mouth over, one last time, as he lost track of where his desire ended and Arthur’s began and finally spread out his hand into the rough stroke Arthur needed to pull him over the edge, his whole body strung out electrically as he came and came, a groan like a gut punch breaking out of him.

He melted like butter in Eames’s hands as the spasms of pleasure spent themselves and released him. Eames’s hungry bites subsided into wistful kisses down the line of Arthur’s throat. 

He listened to the calming rhythm of Arthur’s breaths, the delicate, dry swallow as he tested out the damage he’d done himself. Everyday sounds came back into the room: the bar fridge motor exerting itself, the cheer of a stadium crown from a television next door, a room door carelessly closed. 

Then there was the tightening of muscle that told him to step back as Arthur pulled himself together, hunching over his bent knee to cover up everything that, moments ago, he’d laid open so freely. Eames ventured one last kiss, planted where his ruined shirt was just clinging to the joint of his shoulder, and went into the bathroom to wash up and sort out his trousers.

When he came back, Arthur was shaking out his jacket and adjusting it on its hanger. There was an indented line, from the edge of the desk, creasing the back of his thigh. Just looking at the slender line of his waist through the shirt, the tempting curve of buttocks beneath it, his imagination turned to another round.

Arthur closed the closet door and leaned back against it. 

“If you’re making an argument for why you should get the under-cover work next time,” he said, nothing but a raw husk in his voice to suggest he was anything but in perfect control, “you should know you’re swaying me completely in the other direction.”

“You liked that, did you?”

Arthur answered the question with a look, and shrugged off his shirt and tie. Eames watched as he made his unhurried way across the room. He had the same sure-footed grace, Eames thought, in or out of a suit. No need to sway his hips: Eames couldn’t take his eyes off the efficient shift of muscle that powered each simple step. 

When he stopped next to Eames in the doorway, his eyes skimmed with interest over Eames’s naked chest and shoulders, but the only contact was when he thumbed a stray smear of come from just above Eames’s hip-bone and sucked it into his mouth. Their eyes met warmly as he took his time, savouring. 

“Come to bed,” he said, and pushed a sweaty lock of Eames’s hair back from his forehead. “I get what a huge sacrifice it was for you to miss out on all those conversations about heritage overlays and rezoned industrial real estate. I’ve got a bit of work left to do if I’m going to make it up to you. Wouldn’t you say?”

Eames remembered this playful mood from the first night they’d slept together, the first night of the job, when they’d stumbled drunk and reckless back to his hotel room. And he remembered even more clearly the ache of finding it so completely vanished on the hungover morning after. He wasn’t sure how permanent a thing Arthur was looking for here, and to be fair he had questions to answer himself about how much of what he wanted from Arthur came from the heart and how much from that native curiosity to see how much he could get. But moments like these made him blindingly confident. They were risk-takers, both of them, and problem solvers, and resilient enough to take the biggest risk of all and see this spectacular thing through to its end.

“You know what I’d really like?” 

There was something a bit melancholy in Arthur’s smile this time. “Yes,” he said. “I know,” and touched Eames’s mouth with his wet thumb. “But you still have to work for it.”

He slipped away into the bedroom. The ensuite tap ran. There was the click of a bedside lamp going on. 

Eames picked up his stray clothes and dumped them on the chair, collected his notepad from the floor. That was a new thing he had now. A memory he could reignite anytime he wanted by ordering a pint and sucking the froth off his lips, nothing but a hot glance in Arthur’s direction to bring them back here. Since their first surprising hook-up, Arthur had been straighter than ever in their professional life, shutting down any hint of warmth in front of the team and going out of his way to find fault with Eames’s work. But then there were these moments of unexpected concession, and, even less expected, the glimpses of how hard Arthur had to work against his own instincts to make them happen.

Retrieving his laptop from its precarious position hanging off the edge of the desk, he sent his notes of the evening’s work to Arthur, because tomorrow it would be business as usual. 

Last of all, he picked up the lager can, then put it back down again, exactly where he found it, because tomorrow it would be something a bit more than business as usual too.

**


End file.
